#david harsent

[feydravthaa]

‘‘Here is your space, lie down or stand or sit, it will take your shape. / Be still if you can. Look into yourself for what is soft and spoiled, / for pulp, for that dark damage. There was a morning, once, sunlit / and you in the full of it, unimpeded, set up to be lost then lost, / falling in with those near-broken by love, fallin in / with those given over to harm. Be still if you can: you will hear / the sound of yourself, blood purling along the bone; and it might / come to you that regret has an afterlife, that it stains and stays, / that what you have left is what you now hold to your heart / which is nothing and less than nothing in this fog of exile.’’

David Harsent, Salt

[pairedaeza]

A bird on every bough. The whole place cluttered with sunlight. Something half-heard as the last guest leaves. Breakage. Spillage. Wreckage of tansy and eyebright.

David Harsent, ‘The Garden in Dream’

[feydravthaa]

‘‘The want of emptiness as if it were a place, a house, a room / within the house, as if to stand unmoving at the dead / centre of the room would usher in / yourself as abstract, all potential gone, all remedy, / light falling into light, that subtle wind the winnow of your soul.’’

David Harsent, Salt

[feydravthaa]

‘‘As pen to paper, so razor to strop; it’s written in blood.’’

David Harsent, Salt

[pairedaeza]

Full length under a wide white sky in a place like this, or a place you think you remember, or wherever it is she happens to turn her face

to the sun, eyes open a moment, then the flare and crush of red behind the lids and you at her side to watch the sudden blush

that prickles her skin, the first fine hint of burn, as you get the tip of your tongue to her cheek for the salt-lick of her sweat.

David Harsent, ‘Blood Heat’

[martyncrucefix]

Autumn Reading Dates 2025

A little flock of reading dates – replacing the swifts that have left our skies recently – have gathered themselves into something that almost resembles a brief Autumn Reading Tour. Admittedly, not going too far beyond the Greater London area – but to Maidstone and (briefly) Winchester – but of course I’m very happy to be granted these opportunities to read my work. And, as you’ll see from the…

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[manwalksintobar]

Tinnitus: May, low skies and thunder // David Harsent

Rough music in the lane, the love child lapped in blood and safe at her breast, the pain echoed in wood on wood, steel on steel, as they come, the women in their blacks, to hound her from house and home, bands of bitches and claques of crones with their pots and pans, their hooks and ladles and bowls, to beat outside in the street, to stand at her window and howl, while the child takes a taste of green milk and “the dead of night” is all she has of her own and the music goes on and on.

[voirlvmer]

it might come to you that regret has an afterlife, that it stains and stays, that what you have left is what you now hold to your heart which is nothing and less than nothing in this fog of exile.

David Harsent, from Salt